Tag Archives: single board computer

The Single Board Computer(SBC) is a ready to use reference embedded platform that has all the necessary peripheral interfaces required to rapidly prototype your product. This usually comes in standard Pico ITX or Credit Card Size form factors. Inforce currently has the IFC6640, IFC6560 and the IFC6309 which uses the Snapdragon 820, Snapdragon 660 and the Snapdragon 410 respectively. SBC’s usually exposes all interfaces available to the SOC like GPIO’s/BLSP’s, USB, GPS. WiFi/BT, RJ45(Ethernet), Audio in/out, HDMI, MiPi DSI and CSI.Continue reading Why Use Inforce SBC(Single Board Computer)?→

Can you believe we’re already into the 2H of 2016?! Hope our US readers have had a great 4th of July weekend, while everyone out there is also enjoying the full tilt of summer. Welcome to Inforce Computing’s July 2016 Newsletter! In this issue of Inforce Insights, we’d like to share a couple of technical notes [thermal management methods for Inforce’s SBCs & SOMs and running Debian Linux on the Inforce 6309 Micro SBC platform], an article on emerging IoT solutions in the burgeoning asset tracking space, and an interesting customer case study on video collaboration (scroll down). In the June newsletter, we shared the news about NASA’s Astrobee embedding two of Inforce’s compute platforms in their next-gen free-flying robot—did we also mention that the Inforce 6501 Micro SOM beat five other vendor products in a bakeoff? If you missed that part, you can read the benchmarking study here and find out why.

Have a great rest of the summer. Stay safe, cool, and hydrated, and please do share your stories of building great embedded IoT products with us at marketing@inforcecomputing.com!

Hope all of you have had a great start to 2016 after a much needed Christmas and New Year’s break. If you will be at CES 2016 this week (January 6-9) in Las Vegas, please do stop by the following Qualcomm® booths to take a look at Inforce Computing’s exciting Snapdragon™ processor-based compute platforms in the form of SBCs, SoMs, and development kits.

OK, have you been working on or thinking of bringing that cool high-performance next generation industrial internet-of-everything (IoE) idea to market? Are you feeling weighed down by stringent requirements such as robust upstream Linux kernel/Android OS and device driver support, extended operating temperature range (you could possibly be designing a next-gen outdoor smart signage or billboard that does real-time heavy-duty analytics, to withstand the deep freeze of the winter in Minneapolis or sizzling summers in Las Vegas or Phoenix), and your end-products have a long product lifecycle? Does your product live in hostile environments (electrical and thermal) that requires EMI noise protection, proper thermal design/heat dissipation, and are actively considering including things like Power-over-Ethernet and RS485 ports? While all of this sounds really exciting and challenging at the same time, are you struggling to find the right high-performance compute platform that fits these needs in a cost-effective and reliable way to scale to production volume manufacturing? Despair not; help is on the way in the form of the latest Inforce 6309 Micro SBC, powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor!

Last week’s panel discussion at the Churchill Club titled “Civilian Drones: The Opportunity Takes Flight” touched varied topics from open source autopilot designs (such as the Pixhawk PX4) that have democratized access to technologies, to auto-navigation and collision avoidance, increasing battery life and payload weight, FAA regulations, and everything in between. The past year has indeed seen frenzied activity in the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) or drone space. Several use cases have taken shape, but how many of them are going to be commercially viable and sustainable in the long run? Businesses and large corporations are actively looking to use drones to monitor their assets, infrastructure, and operations. Start-ups in this space are trying to carve a niche by differentiating with unique underlying technologies such as collision avoidance and auto-navigation, which seek to unlock the potential for new use-cases. New services that offer businesses and corporate entities instant access to professional “drone pilots” with their fleet of UAVs for hire, provide imagery and data collection for a fee. Here are a few quick takeaways from the discussions. Continue reading Commercial Drones: Where’re the Viable Use-cases and Core Technologies to Differentiate in a Crowded Marketplace?→

We are delighted to announce the availability of the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 600 (APQ8064 SoC) powered brand newInforce 6410Plus™ Single-board-computer (SBC). With the introduction of the product/application-ready Inforce 6410Plus, what’s been a such a workhorse for several hundreds of projects over the past two years, just got even better. The popular Inforce 6410 SBC received a major upgrade with several new added features. Continued excellent software support (Linaro Ubuntu Linux and Android BSPs, peripheral device drivers, Robot Operating System [ROS]) makes it easy plug-and-play. And the cherry on the cake is that you can purchase the Inforce 6410Plus for the same price of $143 (board only) as before.

Several robots will face off at the upcoming DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) finals in Pomona, Calif., June 5-6, 2015. So, what’s at stake, you might ask. How about a cool $3.5 Mil. in prizes? The winner grabs a sweet $2MM, the runner-up $1MM, and the third place gets $500K–that’s no chump change! This challenge involves navigating a difficult simulated disaster-response course and 24 of the world’s top robotics teams are competing. The course will obviously not be easy–with degraded communication hampering the robot operators, arduous and successive physical tasks include driving a utility vehicle, stepping out and opening doors, locating and closing valves, cutting through walls, clearing debris, and walking up stairs. Here’s a cool video from the WPI-CMU team! As you can see, the DRC is setup to test mobility, dexterity, manipulation, perception, and decision making skills these robots need to excel at to navigate hazardous conditions in disaster affected areas.

Along the sidelines of the DRC challenge, you will also get to see over 80 companies display their robots and UAVs at the Technology Exposition. The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) will demo their Turtlebot exhibit among other things–please do stop by their booth #14. What’s unique about the Turtlebot demo? It runs the Robot Operating System (ROS) and is powered by the Inforce 6410 single board computer (SBC). Recall that Qualcomm ported ROS to the Snapdragon 600 powered Inforce 6410 last year. Get your hand at driving these Turtlebots around and share your experience!

Talking about the Inforce 6410, ARM recently did a nice review of the SBC and the response to what can be done with the board was fantastic. Sorry, a winner has already been announced. If you are serious about building robots and drones that solve real-life human problems, look no further than starting with the compute building blocks Inforce provides in the form of SOMs and SBCs. Check out the ubiquitous Inforce 6501 Micro SOM that measures just 28mm x 50mm and weighs under 8 grams (0.3oz). With a profile of just 6mm and powered by the Snapdragon™ 805 processor, a custom carrier board with the right kind of I/Os can be built to fit into some of these SWaP constrained designs. You can jump-start your robot designs with Qualcomm’s FastCV™, Vuforia™, Alljoyn™, Hexagon™, and other SDKs that enable computer vision, machine learning, pattern recognition, and communication capabilities on Inforce’s compute platforms.

Want to find out more about the free-and-open-source-software (FOSS) Freedreno Linux graphics drivers or embedded Android for Snapdragon basedInforce 6410 and Inforce 6540 SBCs? If youplan to be at the Linux Foundation’s Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) and the co-located Android Builders Summit, March 23-25 in San Jose, CA this week, check out these really interesting presentations/ tutorials where Inforce Computing’s products (such as the Inforce 6410 and Inforce 6540 SBCs) will be shown in demos. The ELC is being held at the Marriott in downtown San Jose, CA.

Rob Clark (the main guy behind the FOSS Freedreno Linux graphics drivers for the Adreno 3XX and 4XX series of GPUs in the Snapdragon family of processors) will talk about the progress he and other fellow contributors have made to an upstream gallium and kernel drm/kms driver. This has resulted in software that now also works on Inforce’s Snapdragon based products (composited DE’s like gnome-shell, Wayland, games, WebGL, etc., which one has come to take for granted on x86 based desktops!) If you need to get a sneak preview of his talk, check out what was shown at the recent Linaro Connect in Hong Kong:

Also, stop by the Technical Showcase at the ELC (see details below) to see the Freedreno demos running on the Inforce 6410 and Inforce 6540 SBCs. I’ll be there supporting Rob and would be glad to answer any questions you may have about Inforce’s products.

The Google open-source Chrome OS team tells us that it has started working on support for theInforce® 6410 single board computer (SBC), which is based on the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 600 processor. In a Google+ post just a few days ago, this was shared by François Beaufort, Google’s open-source evangelist in the Chrome OS team.

Rob Clark, the main force behind the open-source freedreno graphics drivers for the Adreno 3XX and 4XX GPUs in Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs, commented on the same post that this was a community effort along with Sean Paul of the Chrome OS team. With an upstream kernel running on the Inforce 6410 SBC, and an open source Gallium3D driver available, it was natural to work towards a Snapdragon based (ARMv7 compliant) free-and-open-source-software (FOSS) Chromium OS build. The Inforce 6410 SBC was thus an easy choice to port Chrome OS to the Snapdragon 600 processor (APQ8064 SoC). So stay tuned for further progress on this effort and the availability of Chrome OS builds for the Inforce 6410 SBC.

Coming close on the heels of Robot Operating System (ROS) support for Inforce 6410 SBC and the availability of board support packages (BSP) for Linaro (Ubuntu Linux 14.10) and Android (KitKat 4.4), the versatile Inforce 6410 platform provides multiple OS support for jumpstarting embedded designs. The icing on the cake is the availability for freedreno graphics drivers for Fedora, Linaro, and now Chrome OS (under development), making the Inforce 6410 SBC a popular choice for a variety of embedded applications.